Why are HTML character entities necessary?

Question

Why are HTML character entities necessary? What good are they? I don\'t see the point.

Answer 1

You use entities to help the parser distinguish when a character should be represented as HTML, and what you really want to show the user, as HTML will reserve a special set of characters for itself.

Typing this literally in HTML

I don't mean it like that

will cause the "" tag to disappear,

e.g.

I don't mean it like that

as HTML does not have a tag defined as such. In this case, using entities will allow the text to display properly.

e.g.

No, really! </sarcasm>

gives

No, really!

as desired.